Iran executed at least 1,639 people in 2025, according to the joint annual report published by Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Paris-based Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM). That figure is an absolute minimum — IHR requires confirmation from at least two independent sources before recording an execution, and the vast majority of executions inside Iran are not reported in Iranian official media. The real number is almost certainly higher. The 1,639 confirmed executions represent a 68 percent increase on the 975 people Iran put to death in 2024 — itself already an elevated figure. It is by far the highest number recorded since IHR began systematic tracking in 2008, and the highest number reported since 1989, during the earliest years of the Islamic Revolution.

At 1,639 executions across 365 days, that is an average of 4.5 people hanged every single day of the year. Four people every day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. The scale is not the result of a sudden surge in criminal activity. It is the result of a deliberate policy choice by a regime that assessed, correctly, that fear is a more reliable instrument of political control than consent.

Understanding who Iran executes and why is as important as understanding how many. The 1,639 figure is not composed primarily of violent offenders in the conventional sense. The regime’s execution machinery is calibrated across several distinct target groups, each of which serves a different function in its strategy of political control.

Drug offences — approximately half the total. Almost half of all executions recorded in 2025 were for drug-related offences, according to Arab News citing the IHR-ECPM report. Iran’s drug laws allow the death penalty for trafficking quantities that would not attract capital punishment in any Western legal system. Crucially, drug offences are disproportionately charged against ethnic minorities — particularly the Kurdish minority in western Iran and the Baluch community in the southeastern Sistan-Baluchestan province, both of whom are predominantly Sunni Muslim rather than Shia. ECPM executive director Raphael Chenuil-Hazan stated explicitly that “the death penalty in Iran is used as a political tool of oppression and repression, with ethnic minorities and other marginalised groups disproportionately represented among those executed.” Drug enforcement, in this context, functions as ethnic suppression under the cover of criminal law.

Women — 48 executed, a 20-year high. At least 48 women were hanged in 2025 — a 55 percent increase from the 31 executed in 2024 and the highest number recorded in more than two decades, according to the joint report cited by Free Malaysia Today. Of these, 21 were executed for the murder of their husbands or fiancés. Rights groups have consistently documented that women executed for killing a male family member were overwhelmingly the victims of prolonged domestic abuse and violence — with execution representing a double injustice applied to those who survived one form of state-condoned violence only to face another.

Political prisoners and protest-linked individuals. Even during the ongoing war against Israel and the United States that began on February 28, 2026, Iran hanged seven people specifically in connection with the January 2026 protests — six convicted of membership in the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), a banned opposition organisation, and one dual Iranian-Swedish citizen charged with spying for Israel, according to Al-Monitor. The wartime espionage crackdown documented separately by Strategy Battles — in which over 500 people have been arrested since February 28 — feeds directly into this execution pipeline. Those arrested for identifying military targets or transmitting intelligence face wartime legal provisions under which the death penalty is applicable.

Public hangings — a tripling of visible terror. While almost all executions in 2025 were carried out inside prisons, public hangings more than tripled to 11 cases, according to the report. Public executions serve a specific strategic function distinct from prison hangings. They are not primarily about punishment — they are about audience. A prison hanging is a statistic. A public hanging is a warning delivered to an entire community in real time. The tripling of public executions in 2025 is a deliberate escalation of visible state violence designed to suppress the social conditions that produce protest movements.

IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam was precise about the function of the 2025 execution surge: “By creating fear through an average of four to five executions per day in 2025, authorities tried to prevent new protests and prolong their crumbling rule,” as reported by Asharq Al-Awsat. This is not a description of criminal justice. It is a description of terror as governance. The regime’s own behaviour — the frequency, the public visibility, the targeting of ethnic minorities and political opponents — demonstrates that it views execution as a tool of population management rather than a response to crime.

The 68 percent escalation from 2024 to 2025 is not random. It corresponds directly to the period in which Iran faced its most significant internal political crisis since 1979. The January 2026 protests — which preceded the current war by weeks — were described by rights groups as the largest domestic uprising since the Islamic Revolution itself. The regime’s response was to kill thousands of protesters in the streets and arrest tens of thousands more. The execution machine is the downstream processing facility for those arrests. The 1,639 who were hanged in 2025 are the advance guard of a much larger population now sitting in Iranian prisons under capital charges. The IHR-ECPM report explicitly warned that “hundreds of detained protesters remain at risk of death sentences and execution” after the January 2026 crackdown.

“If the Islamic republic survives the current crisis, there is a serious risk that executions will be used even more extensively as a tool of oppression and repression.”

— Iran Human Rights and Together Against the Death Penalty Joint Annual Report, April 2026, cited by Al-Monitor

The phrase “if the Islamic republic survives the current crisis” is not rhetorical hedging. It reflects the NGOs’ assessment that the regime itself is operating under existential pressure — pressure from the war, from the January protests, from the loss of its Supreme Leader, from the degradation of its military and intelligence leadership, and from an economy strangled by the Hormuz closure and decades of sanctions. A regime that is executing an average of 4.5 people per day is not a regime that feels secure. It is a regime that has concluded that visible, large-scale state violence is the most effective remaining instrument for preventing the internal collapse it fears more than any external military campaign.

The comparison to 1989 is not arbitrary. In 1988 and 1989, the Islamic Republic carried out what human rights organisations describe as a mass execution of political prisoners — primarily MEK members and left-wing activists — on the orders of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Estimates of the number killed in that period range from several thousand to over ten thousand, carried out in secret in prisons across the country. It remains one of the most significant mass atrocities in the history of the Islamic Republic and one of the least examined internationally. The fact that 2025’s confirmed execution figure is the highest since that period is a direct and deliberate reference point — not to scale but to character. The regime is operating with the same logic of political extermination it used in 1989, now applied through the formal legal machinery of the criminal justice system rather than secret prison killings.

Iran executes more people per capita than any other country in the world, according to Amnesty International, and more in absolute terms than any country other than China — for which no reliable data is available, according to Free Malaysia Today citing the joint report. That is not a temporary statistical anomaly produced by one bad year. It is the result of a sustained, multi-decade policy in which capital punishment has been embedded as a routine instrument of political and social control — and which has now, under the pressure of war and protest, been dramatically escalated.

Analysis

The 1,639 executions confirmed for 2025 are not simply a human rights statistic. They are a strategic data point. They tell us that the Iranian regime entered the current war in a condition of deep internal insecurity — that it was already killing 4.5 people per day to prevent domestic uprising before a single U.S. or Israeli aircraft crossed its border on February 28. The escalation in executions in 2025 is the upstream signal of the January 2026 protests, the January protests are the upstream signal of the February 28 decision to launch Operation Epic Fury, and the execution of seven people for protest-related offences during active wartime operations tells us the regime has not suspended its internal suppression campaign even while fighting an external war. A government that executes at this rate is not governing through legitimacy. It is governing through fear — and it knows the difference. The IHR-ECPM warning that executions may increase further if the regime survives the current crisis is one of the most significant strategic assessments in this entire conflict. It means that a ceasefire or even a negotiated end to the Iran-Israel-U.S. war does not reduce the threat to Iran’s own population. It may accelerate it.

Sources

• Al-Monitor — Iran Executed at Least 1,639 People in 2025, Most Since 1989: NGOs (April 13, 2026)
• Free Malaysia Today — Rights Groups Say Iran Executed at Least 1,639 in 2025 (April 13, 2026)
• Asharq Al-Awsat — NGOs: Iran Executed at Least 1,639 People in 2025, Most Since 1989
• Arab News — Iran Executed at Least 1,639 People in 2025, Most Since 1989: NGOs
• Iran Human Rights (IHR) — Joint Annual Report on Executions in Iran 2025